Giulia Cacciuttolo

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Giulia Cacciuttolo

How we dwell memory.

My practice is focused on the general concepts of time and space connected with memory.

My research about space started from the concept of the “oneiric” house described by Bachelard. The house became concept of shelter and refuge also on a psychological level. Bachelard defines ‘dream home’ – in which we are free to daydream – the place where our mind lives and creates. Instinctively, it takes the form of the place we are most familiar, and that makes us feel safe: our starting model is undoubtedly the home of our childhood. This house embodies not only the home, but it is also the incarnation of our dreams. This house has the power to trigger our memories.

There are two different realities of the house – the physical one and the oneiric one – and they are strongly linked. Our way to experience both is born in the same place and in the same moment: in our early ages. What we experience in one, inevitably affect the other.

Bringing forward Bachelard’s idea of the physical house as a reflection of our mental shelter, my current practice is focused on understanding why besides our mental archive of memories we feel the need to accumulate also physical traces of the past in our home.

Heidegger’s idea of dwelling is deeply linked with the concept of being: the word dwell itself in its original significance meant to be; meant ‘the way we exists’ as human beings.

So, there is a deep and ancestral psychological intrinsic meaning in the concept of dwelling. We want to dwell even before we are aware of it and of its sense. Then, how is this atavistic impulse of belonging in a psychological charged place connected with the need of accumulating things from our past?

Time and space are the two main coordinates of a memory: something happened in a given time and in a given space. But actually memory has the capacity to undermine these two cardinal points: often we think that we have a perfect remembrance of the shape of an object in a given place or of the face of a loved one, when on the contrary we keep only a general ‘sensation’ of the object, the place or the person. If we could physically confront our memory with the actual object or space we would notice that the general shape is the same but that there are a lot of missing or different details.

However, even if our own way of registering a memory could interfere irreparably with the truthful object or moment, space can work as a really powerful trigger for memories that we thought were lost. So, between time/space and memory there is a relationship with multiple dynamics and different possible levels of reading.

Therefore, my research is intent to explore these mechanics between time, space and memory, how they interact and what is our position in this regard as human beings; and moreover to understand what is the position and the responsibility of the artist and what role painting and art in general could have.

” Art is an inner need that is born as an answer to the confrontation with the outside – with something that is other from us. It is a physical and visual answer to this tension between inside and outside. The artwork can be seen as a physical manifestation of our inside, which has to confront itself with the outside – the public and the space in which it is placed. ”